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Comment by bkmn | Hacker News Reader

As others have said this is probably just a test/erronous/etc, but it's pretty funny there's a "darwin/" directory in there.

I'm betting Windows 10 will be free (as in beer) - there's not much else MSFT can do to keep Windows competitive. But it's an interesting thought experiment to think they would add a darwin compatibility layer in Win 10...

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It's [Windows Installer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames).

Ah. Nice catch.

The important market segments won't get Windows 10 for free as in beer. The segmentation will be along the lines of Redhat [desktop costs more than Windows per year] and Fedora.[you get pointed to a BBS for support].

So yeah there may be a zero dollar option, but it will offer a poor ROI under many business models. Shedding support for zero dollar users by crowd sourcing would allow Microsoft to promote their paid support options in a more focused way.

Yeah, I think you're right on the support options.

Off topic: Could someone in the startup industry please create a betting site for these sorts of things?

No money involved, but you can make predictions on predictionbook.com

http://longbets.org/

Free as in beer would make Windows so much more competitive as a development and deployment environment— being able to pull a base image off Vagrantcloud alone would be a big difference for many, I suspect.

I bet there would be a spike of interest in packaging stuff for cygwin, too.

Free for educational and personal use only. I doubt your use would include that.

Free for business would kill Microsoft, as much as they bet on their hardware locked in devices these days. They're not Apple just yet.

How much money does Windows make from OS licenses vs licenses from SQLServer/Office/Exchange/Sharepoint etc. etc. It's not impossible that a free OS would lead to selling more SQLServer and Office licenses and making up some of the difference there.

Office is the real cash cow, what users really want.

Everything else can be emulated away, but no accountant will ever work without MSExcel, no lawyer will work without MSWord, and Outlook is still the best integrated mail/calendar tool. Exchange and SQLServer are profitable, but they don't provide the same amount of lock-in and revenue that Office does.

However, this won't continue forever, especially with the move to mobile. I'd argue that giving away Windows Server would be a good move to try and secure the Office monopoly beyond the next five years.

I think what might work is a free shell version, that can only run custom apps and which can be admined from a purchased Windows Server.

> Free as in beer would make Windows so much more competitive as a development and deployment environment.

Windows Server is unlikely to be free any time soon. Windows desktop might be, if they can plug/bundle some subscription models into it (perhaps office).

Even if Server was free (improbable like I said), that alone might not make it a competitive development or deployment environment. A lot of important work currently happening involves Open Source collaboration, and a free-as-in-beer ecosystem will not be able to take advantage of it. Earlier today, I was reading up on how AppFabric (scaling middleware) is evolving. Looks like it won't, and will soon join the other near-abandoned frameworks (Workflow Foundation, WPF, Silverlight) on the Windows stack. The future of scaling (on Windows) will have something to do with containers just like Linux or BSD. A Windows only approach to solving general industry problems is not going to cut it anymore.

In such a scenario, the primary development and deployment platforms supporting important industry trends will be free-as-in-speech Open Source platforms.

Add: Not saying MS is going anywhere. They have plenty of momentum.

How about a first-class Posix layer for Windows, a supported cross-platform native application SDK, and a hacker friendly app store supporting the union of packages available from a debian repository plus commercially licensed software? Well, a man can dream.

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